Today I woke up to a new blogad in my account. All I had to do was approve it to score $350 (minus commission). It's up on Atrios and Josh Marshall's site, but here is the key graphic:
Can there be no doubt that despite the heroic efforts of a handful of TNR contributors (Lizza, Cohn and Scheiber), that the magazine is hell-bent on destroying our most likely nominee?
This ad might've as well been designed by the Weekly Standard or National Review. At least they're honest about their ideological leanings.
I wrote yesterday that TNR was fast losing its relevance even as sites like this one rose in prominence. The Noam Scheiber piece I discussed yesterday got a great deal more exposure thanks to me posting it, having it picked up by Atrios and at least several other blogs.
I wonder if that helped TNR decide to spend money advertising on the blogs. If a web article is written, and the blogs don't pick it up, does it make it a sound? There's a real shift at work. Publications that tap into the public mood will thrive (and the blogs are a creation of the public mood). Those that don't -- and here I include TNR -- will fail. Oh, they may hang around thanks to foundation grants or sheer inertia, but they will lack what they all seek above all else -- relevance.
If TNR wants to wage its war against Dean, that's their perogative. I won't let them do it around these parts.
Oh, and if anyone has any doubts left about TNR's intentions:
The New Republic recently sold two-thirds of its ownership to Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt, New York financiers who also recently launched the conservative daily New York Sun. Estimates are that the pair will shovel millions of dollars' worth of subsidies into TNR, as it's known in the media world
Who are Robert Hertog and Michael Steinhardt? The American Prospect
tells us:
Why would Steinhardt, a Democrat who essentially seeded and watered the Progressive Policy Institute, the think-tank appendage of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), want to finance a newspaper that will have the Sun's conservative politics? Why would Hertog, a man of the right and chairman of the Manhattan Institute, the prominent conservative think tank, want a piece of the liberal (more than not, anyway) New Republic? Why, aside from the obvious relief of financial stress, would TNR owner Martin Peretz reduce himself to a minority interest in the magazine he's supported for 28 years?
The answer may be best expressed not by Hertog, Steinhardt, or Peretz, but by Seth Lipsky, editor of the Sun and a man whose decade-long dream of starting a new New York daily is finally coming to fruition. "The right wing of the Democratic Party," Lipsky told me recently, "is a depressed stock." Interesting that it took a journalist to produce the apposite business metaphor. And though the reference to party label shouldn't be taken too literally, Lipsky is describing both the certain ideological niche of the Sun and a likely trajectory of the Hertog-Steinhardt New Republic with some precision. It's exactly on the right-most edge of the Democratic cliff -- where the DLC begins to morph into, say, the American Enterprise Institute; where neoliberalism and neoconservatism, each of which is a vestigial presence now in the twenty-first century, collapse into some new entity that doesn't yet have a fully formed identity, or a name -- that these four men meet, despite having arrived by vastly different paths.
Tomasky's excellent TAP piece also tells us that Hertog is chairman of the prominent right-wing think tank the Manhattan Institute, is affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, and is a donor to the Club for Growth.
While Steinhardt led the DLC until -- get this -- he quit in 1996 in protest of President Clinton's rabid left-wing agenda in his first term. Not exactly a term known for its unabashed liberalism...
In other words, Steinhardt is to the right of the DLC. How that still makes him a Democrat is beyond me. We're talking Zell Miller territory here.
So that's who's behind TNR, which should make things much clearer. They aren't a left-of-center publication. They are a right-of-center one. And while it may serve its niche well, we can't pretend it's on "our side". TNR is not The American Prospect (left) or the Nation (even more left). It belongs in the conservative pantheon alongside the Weekly Standard and National Review.
